Cascadia Advocate

Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Ex-Congressman Frost says Obama will "implode"

This small item in yesterday's Kansas City Star caught my eye. (It's at the bottom of an interesting colulmn about the obsession with crime reporting on Kansas City television stations, also worth a read.)

Spotted at Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ Overland Park inaugural gala: former longtime Democratic Rep. Martin Frost of Texas, now with the Polsinelli law firm.

Frost said he expects U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign to implode eventually. And he said the cocaine dustup a couple of weeks ago amounted to Obama’s “welcome to the NFL moment.”

I think Frost means a "welcome to the Fox Swift Boating Olympics" moment.

Frost, of course, was the "stop Dean for DNC chair" candidate and head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the late 1990's. (Nice job, by the way, Frost. We sure enjoyed being in the minority.)

Mr. Frost appears regularly on Fox News as a political commentator and writes a column for the Fox News Web site.

Little Liebermans like Frost are a dime a dozen, of course. Nothing unusual about a money-grubbing conservative Democrat In Name Only hopping on the gravy train after a career in Congress.

But it's an illustrative little snapshot of where things will go if Obama announces. Why someone who says they are a Democrat would work for Fox News (which is still run by Nixon operative Roger Ailes, for crying out loud) is beyond me.

The only reason it matters, of course, is that part of the mission of Fox News is to give a platform to Liebermans and Frosts, in order to cause problems in the party. Without Fox, neither one of them has much national influence.

We're likely to see such underhanded tactics a lot in the coming months, and the game is pretty simple. Critical comments are made, which then allow the broader media to report that "questions are arising within the party," when in fact Frost now represents nothing but his own pocketbook.

I'm not certain how Obama would perform as a presidential candidate, but I'd hardly predict that he would implode. But then, I don't have the inside knowledge that comes from working for Fox News.